LinkedIn keeps suggesting me posts from people writing about how AI is affecting their work, well, mainly complaining about it. So, I decided to follow my impulse and share a “summarized comment” on this.
New technologies have become an integral part of our lives, and more tools are emerging at high-speed. We always have a choice in how we want to use these technologies – criticize and reject them, or explore how they might bring value, and adapt them to our personal needs. How can we make them work for us? After all, these are just tools.
Can we use them to better understand ourselves? Do we see ourselves as just a Large Language Model? Should AI challenge our sense of identity? Are we giving our power away to a tool, to something outside of ourselves? Let me give you an example from everyday life: If someone insults you, do you become reactive and give your power away? Or do you recognize that this person most likely has some unresolved inner issues? Could it even be a healing opportunity for everyone involved in the situation? It’s an opportunity to learn to stay in your power. I believe it's all about our perception and perspective.
I personally enjoy using AI for small tasks or projects. It’s definitely useful, but it has many caveats, and it does make mistakes. It’s also quite biased. And understandably so: it performs much better in the areas where there is a lot of data available for training. But what about those areas where there is not enough data? What about informed opinion?
For example, I sometimes test ChatGPT by asking it to summarize books I’ve already read and to provide more details on specific sections. The answers are often a mix – some parts are accurate, as there’s more information available, while others are quite odd, even nonsensical. When I point out what’s inaccurate, it replies, “You are absolutely right!” And then rewrites the response in an even more nonsensical way. Is it still useful? Yes. But I take it with a grain of salt.
To me, AI is a great teacher in critical thinking and discernment. Again, it’s just a tool that we can learn to use to our own advantage and greater benefit. But it can never ever overshadow our uniquely human ability to create, to make human-like mistakes, to learn, to adapt, to discern and to perceive truth. No tool, no external system, and nothing artificially created can overpower or replace the uniqueness of our human soul.
It’s valuable to use technology for what it is intended, but it’s more important to understand its limits, and to keep learning about ourselves in the process too.
Written by Liudmila Kazak